I saw my friends had planned to hide, as in some Steinberg drawing, behind whatever masks my work made. But though they knew I was awake, they somehow kept on reading. And when this ruse finally broke, when their copies lowered to show the separate principality of each grinning face, it pleased me more than I can say to note how two of them pressed a thumb or forefinger between slick pages. Keeping their places!

Angie and Robert nodded yes. “But look, pig.” Her stained finger squeaked my paper. “You went and drooled on yours. —I swear, we can get him published, but you still can’t take him out. First sign of success, nods off like some junky, salivates all over his own Page One.”

No! I jerked forward, genuinely sorry, trying to blot it with my shirt cuff. “Wait here,” Marco said. Where, I asked, was he going?

“To buy you a fresh one, Hartley.”

“Hey, they printed others?”

I had always imagined that, after the first publication in some serious place, there would be only a continual Happiness onrolling. But it’s never enough, is it? First you try to make the single good good thing; then you doubt you can ever repeat it.

My new worst fear: One morning next week, in my fourth-floor rear, with a view of the Hudson only if you are an acrobat willing to mount your deskchair uneasy on four casters—I would settle as usual before the yolk-colored Salvation Army desk, I’d expect to write beloved characters through yet another layer of crisis, toward some airier moment’s latent grace; and all that would emerge, my own handwritten instruction: “Go home now. Join the goddamn Country Club, get it over with. Whom did you think you were kidding, Oh One Your Dad Still Calls Our Artiste of The Sewer?”

We who’d stayed in New York, truly stayed put now. Bars no longer asked for my ID. I told myself I went un “carded”—for reasons subtler than simply looking older. (Though I was definitely aging; the city slices its fair share right off the top, directly from your face.) I preferred to feel I simply looked less “new here.” I had lost that rangy glow peculiar to recent arrivals. It’s the glow that makes newcomers first popular and soon suspicious. A glow that, noticed and enjoyed by very many, fades so fast. Now, my writing must sustain whatever diehard virgin blush survived.

Red, Yellow, Blue

e, assuming immortality, used all our primal energy—the primary colors of your late twenties and early thirties: Red, Yellow, Blue.